Dirty Skies

Archive for February 18th, 2006

Sounds cool eh?

I took a Digital Elevation Map (DEM) of the surface of Mars, isolated the area around Olympus Mons, and imported it into Terragen. I then created a camera script of fly over the martian volcano. Admittedly I could have done a much better job with the surface texture and the vertical scale is a little off… but you get the idea! It took 14 hours to render this on my dual 1 GHz processor Mac so it wasn’t like I could say “oops let me fix that” and buzz off another render. Next time I’ll endeavor to get the scene looking perfect BEFORE I run the job.

My intention is to do a fly-though of Valles Marineris.

Anyway, here’s Olympus_Mons_Overflight.mov (6.9 MB)

You’ll need Apple – QuickTime to view the file.